hamlet

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. A small village.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A small village or a group of houses.

n. A village that does not have its own church.

n. Any of the fish of the genus Hypoplectrus in the family Serranidae.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A small village; a little cluster of houses in the country.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A small village; a little cluster of houses in the country; especially, in England, a village without a church, which therefore for its ecclesiastical service belongs to the parish represented by another village. Compare parish.

n.Synonyms See town.

n. A fish of the family Serranidæ, Epinephelus striatus, also called Nassau grouper, common in the West Indies and along the Florida coast. It is chestnut-brown or slate-colored, with vermilion lips and throat.

n. the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy who hoped to avenge the murder of his father

n. a community of people smaller than a village

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

Middle English hamelet, from Old French, diminutive of hamel, diminutive of ham, village, of Germanic origin; see tkei- in Indo-European roots.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle French hamelet, diminutive of Old French ham (Modern French hameau) of Germanic origin. Cognates include home, Dutch heem, German Heim, Old English hām. (English usage before the 12th century)

Examples

Based on the Victorian-era writings of Elizabeth Gaskell about a village in 1840s England on the brink of change, this three-part mini-series tells the story of a woman who moves to the title hamlet to live with her two spinster friends.

I saw Hamlet several imes in theaters, real heaters, not movies one, as well as an old black and white movie version of it and i can tell you that Mel Gbsons incarnation of hamlet is the very best ever made .. which nobody believed he could at first .. being an aussie and all that .. lol surprise!

The raids came late Saturday night, just before midnight, when police swarmed a home rented by the biathlon team near the mountain hamlet of San Sicario; a similar search was conducted at quarters in nearby Pragelato.

In a mountain hamlet nestled into the French Alps at Queyras, we drank café-au-lait* from gigantic ceramic bowls, slathered homemade confiture de mûres* over fat slices of buttered bread and talked about how well we slept the night before.

What struck me was not the obvious Nazi and Stalinist embrace of institutional torture but the offhand mentions of basements in Bulgarian hamlet police stations or the treatment of captured stragglers by patrols in the Spanish Civil War -- capture, an hour or so of "interrogation", summary execution.